Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. See https://www.drupal.org/node/2966725', 'exception', 'Drupal\Core\Render\Element\RenderCallbackInterface') (Line: 797) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doCallback('#pre_render', Array, Array) (Line: 386) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 106) __TwigTemplate_4039b6d648e4a30fc59604b38849a688->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 46) __TwigTemplate_d1494d795b4bd5366283e85f3e7729dc->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 43) __TwigTemplate_253b62141ad73ee07345b0067cf59829->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array) (Line: 379) Twig\Template->render(Array, Array) (Line: 40) Twig\TemplateWrapper->render(Array) (Line: 53) twig_render_template('themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig', Array) (Line: 372) Drupal\Core\Theme\ThemeManager->render('field', Array) (Line: 445) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array) (Line: 458) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 231) __TwigTemplate_d0a4e06ec4cdc862487a9e59e7ee55e6->block_node_content(Array, Array) (Line: 171) Twig\Template->displayBlock('node_content', Array, Array) (Line: 91) __TwigTemplate_fb45c12c057c90d6dad87acc3f8af627->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 51) __TwigTemplate_d0a4e06ec4cdc862487a9e59e7ee55e6->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) 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Drupal\Core\Theme\ThemeManager->render('views_view_unformatted', Array) (Line: 445) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array) (Line: 458) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 129) __TwigTemplate_c1babb60e112ad993125dc5af5a5b779->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array) (Line: 379) Twig\Template->render(Array, Array) (Line: 40) Twig\TemplateWrapper->render(Array) (Line: 53) twig_render_template('themes/custom/risdmuseum/templates/views/views-view--site-search--page-1.html.twig', Array) (Line: 372) Drupal\Core\Theme\ThemeManager->render('views_view__site_search__page_1', Array) (Line: 445) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array) (Line: 458) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array, ) (Line: 238) Drupal\Core\Render\MainContent\HtmlRenderer->Drupal\Core\Render\MainContent\{closure}() (Line: 592) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->executeInRenderContext(Object, Object) (Line: 239) Drupal\Core\Render\MainContent\HtmlRenderer->prepare(Array, Object, Object) (Line: 128) Drupal\Core\Render\MainContent\HtmlRenderer->renderResponse(Array, Object, Object) (Line: 90) Drupal\Core\EventSubscriber\MainContentViewSubscriber->onViewRenderArray(Object, 'kernel.view', Object) call_user_func(Array, Object, 'kernel.view', Object) (Line: 111) Drupal\Component\EventDispatcher\ContainerAwareEventDispatcher->dispatch(Object, 'kernel.view') (Line: 186) Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handleRaw(Object, 1) (Line: 76) Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handle(Object, 1, 1) (Line: 58) Drupal\Core\StackMiddleware\Session->handle(Object, 1, 1) (Line: 48) Drupal\Core\StackMiddleware\KernelPreHandle->handle(Object, 1, 1) (Line: 191) 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. See https://www.drupal.org/node/2966725', 'exception', 'Drupal\Core\Render\Element\RenderCallbackInterface') (Line: 797) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doCallback('#pre_render', Array, Array) (Line: 386) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 106) __TwigTemplate_4039b6d648e4a30fc59604b38849a688->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 46) __TwigTemplate_d1494d795b4bd5366283e85f3e7729dc->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 43) __TwigTemplate_253b62141ad73ee07345b0067cf59829->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array) (Line: 379) Twig\Template->render(Array, Array) (Line: 40) Twig\TemplateWrapper->render(Array) (Line: 53) twig_render_template('themes/contrib/classy/templates/field/field--text-with-summary.html.twig', Array) (Line: 372) Drupal\Core\Theme\ThemeManager->render('field', Array) (Line: 445) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array) (Line: 458) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 231) __TwigTemplate_d0a4e06ec4cdc862487a9e59e7ee55e6->block_node_content(Array, Array) (Line: 171) Twig\Template->displayBlock('node_content', Array, Array) (Line: 91) __TwigTemplate_fb45c12c057c90d6dad87acc3f8af627->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array, Array) (Line: 51) __TwigTemplate_d0a4e06ec4cdc862487a9e59e7ee55e6->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) 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Drupal\Core\Theme\ThemeManager->render('views_view_unformatted', Array) (Line: 445) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array) (Line: 458) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array) (Line: 474) Drupal\Core\Template\TwigExtension->escapeFilter(Object, Array, 'html', NULL, 1) (Line: 129) __TwigTemplate_c1babb60e112ad993125dc5af5a5b779->doDisplay(Array, Array) (Line: 394) Twig\Template->displayWithErrorHandling(Array, Array) (Line: 367) Twig\Template->display(Array) (Line: 379) Twig\Template->render(Array, Array) (Line: 40) Twig\TemplateWrapper->render(Array) (Line: 53) twig_render_template('themes/custom/risdmuseum/templates/views/views-view--site-search--page-1.html.twig', Array) (Line: 372) Drupal\Core\Theme\ThemeManager->render('views_view__site_search__page_1', Array) (Line: 445) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array) (Line: 458) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doRender(Array, ) (Line: 204) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->render(Array, ) (Line: 238) Drupal\Core\Render\MainContent\HtmlRenderer->Drupal\Core\Render\MainContent\{closure}() (Line: 592) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->executeInRenderContext(Object, Object) (Line: 239) Drupal\Core\Render\MainContent\HtmlRenderer->prepare(Array, Object, Object) (Line: 128) Drupal\Core\Render\MainContent\HtmlRenderer->renderResponse(Array, Object, Object) (Line: 90) Drupal\Core\EventSubscriber\MainContentViewSubscriber->onViewRenderArray(Object, 'kernel.view', Object) call_user_func(Array, Object, 'kernel.view', Object) (Line: 111) Drupal\Component\EventDispatcher\ContainerAwareEventDispatcher->dispatch(Object, 'kernel.view') (Line: 186) Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handleRaw(Object, 1) (Line: 76) Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernel->handle(Object, 1, 1) (Line: 58) Drupal\Core\StackMiddleware\Session->handle(Object, 1, 1) (Line: 48) Drupal\Core\StackMiddleware\KernelPreHandle->handle(Object, 1, 1) (Line: 191) 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, but came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled with them in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Although details of his early artistic training are unknown, by 1850 he advertised himself as a teacher of “an improved system of monochromatic painting.”Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, in Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 1990), 115; their Chronology section notes the first advertisement of Bierstadt’s services in the New Bedford Standard of May 13, 1850, and cites Richard Schafer Trump, The Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt (dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963), 23, for quoting a broadside of June 6, 1850, promoting his “improved system.” The following year he added instruction in “Painting Colored Crayon Heads and Landscapes from nature, or from copies,” as well as “a new style of sketching from nature which can be acquired in one lesson.”Newport Daily News, June 7, 1851, cited in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 116. During the early 1850s, Bierstadt exhibited his work in Boston and collaborated with the American artist George Harvey on a light show that utilized the latter’s “dissolving views” of landscapes painted on glass.Anderson and Ferber, 116. In 1853 Bierstadt became a naturalized American citizen and returned to Germany to continue his own artistic education. When Bierstadt arrived in Europe he was disappointed to learn of the death of Johann Peter Hasenclever, the noted Düsseldorf genre painter with whom he had planned to study. He remained in that city, however, and although he did not officially enter the Düsseldorf Academy, he progressed quickly under the guidance of American colleagues Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, the German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach, and the circle of artists around Carl Friedrich Lessing. The hallmarks of Düsseldorf painting at mid-century were accurate draftsmanship and truthful rendering of natural forms, applied equally to figures and to landscape. In the process of mastering this style, Bierstadt set out in the spring of 1854 to explore the Westphalian countryside and to make careful sketches that could become the sources for paintings. In <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em>, one of the drawings from that first sketching trip, Bierstadt described the yard of a cooperage on the banks of the Rhine. Using only pencil and opaque white wash, he coaxed a landscape from the uniform tan tone of a smooth-surfaced paper. The subject might have attracted Bierstadt for personal reasons: his father had emigrated from Germany as a cooper and continued to practice this trade in the United States. Set in a shallow cove, the scene provides a glimpse of local industry that adds distinctive genre elements to the landscape. While there are no descriptive signs of the workshop or forge, whole barrels are visible at left, and others with sprung rims, broken staves, and missing heads are scattered about the foreground. Bierstadt made numerous costume studies as part of his Düsseldorf training and used this knowledge to distinguish the figures in his compositions. Of the four men depicted here, the two wearing wide-brimmed black hats may have come from a nearby vineyard or granary to negotiate the purchase or repair of the barrels. The old stone structure, which could have served as the cooper’s shop, supplies the drawing with a picturesque focus and randomly separates sunlight from shadow through the boards of its wooden awning. Its humble profile stands in contrast to the sweeping cliffs that prefigure the dramatic settings of Bierstadt’s later work. Ruins, old mills, and barns were familiar motifs in landscape paintings. Fallen into decay, they suggested reunion with nature; when still in use, they depicted aspects of times past, or of rural commerce, which appealed to urban collectors. The drawing is carefully organized on the sheet—which is signed with Bierstadt’s monogram on a barrel at left, and dated—and projects a sense of completion. It may have been exchanged with a colleague or given to a friend or family member as a gift, although the primary purpose of drawings made on sketching trips was to serve as sources in the preparation of larger works. The abrupt definition of the cliffs along the shoreline, the effective elimination of middle distance, and the sketchy rendering of trees and grasses reinforce the fact that Bierstadt’s interest was directed to the foreground motif. Although not identified with a documented work, the vignette of the cooperage might have been included in one of the paintings of the following year that incorporated both genre elements and rustic architecture in broader landscape settings.Among the Düsseldorf subjects that included related architectural elements were Westphalian Landscape (1855, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), A Rustic Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 125), and The Old Mill (1855, private collection; illustrated in Anderson and Ferber 1990, 128). Bierstadt’s method of accumulating numerous detailed sketches remained his modus operandi when he explored the American West. The precision of his Western views was also facilitated by photography, the profession adopted by his brothers Charles and Edward. With the destruction of Bierstadt’s Hudson River home and studio by fire in 1882, many of the drawings that he had made throughout his career were lost. Of those that remained in private hands, <em>Landscape on the Rhine</em> is a revealing document of his Düsseldorf training and his early skill as a draftsman. Landscape and Leisure: 19th-Century American Drawings from the Collection is on view at the RISD Museum from March 13 – July 19, 2015. Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Childe Hassam, a successful young book and magazine illustrator, made his first trip abroad in 1883, disembarking in Great Britain then making a wide sweep through France, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. The sheaf of European subjects he brought back became the basis for an exhibition of his watercolors at Boston’s Williams & Everett Gallery in 1884.Hassam showed 67 watercolors of European subjects in the 1884 exhibition Water Colors by Hassam, held at Williams & Everett Gallery, Boston. The complete checklist of titles is included in the appendix “Exhibitions in Hassam’s Lifetime” in H. Barbara Weinberg’s Childe Hassam, American Impressionist (New York, New Haven, and London: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004). That same year, Hassam married Kathleen Maude Doan and moved to an apartment building on Columbus Avenue in the recently developed Back Bay area of Boston.Hassam’s discovery of urban Boston is discussed by Erica E. Hirshler in “Childe Hassam: At Dusk, Boston Common at Twilight” (Boston: MFA Publications, 2015). Hassam’s Boston paintings are also discussed by Stephanie L. Herdrich, “Hassam in Boston, 1859–1886,” in Weinberg, 2004, 29–51; and by Jennifer A. Martin Bienenstock, “Childe Hassam’s Early Boston Cityscapes,” Arts Magazine 55 (Nov. 1980), 168–171. His interest in his new surroundings was revealed in 1885, when he submitted watercolors with titles such as <em>In the Public Garden</em> and <em>Springtime in the City</em> to exhibitions in Boston. In the Public Garden was exhibited at the Boston Art Club, 32nd Exhibition, Water Colors, Black and White Drawings, and Sculpture, April 11–May 2, 1885, no. 129. Springtime in the City was shown at the Boston Water-Color Society, 1st Exhibition, from December 1, 1885, no. 1. Neither watercolor has been indisputably identified with a known work, leaving open the possibility that one of these titles might refer to RISD’s painting. Keen to establish his American reputation as a painter, Hassam selected glimpses of modern life to attract the attention of critics, not only through location but through refined technique and finish.See, for example, the large watercolor on paper The Public Garden (Boston Common), 1885, Slavin Collection, fig. 41 in Weinberg, 2004, 47. On page 16 of Childe Hassam: American Impressionist (Munich and New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994), Ulrich W. Hiesinger notes the improvement of Hassam’s figural style after 1883, when he took life painting classes at the Boston Art Club. One of his instructors there, the Italian painter Tommaso Juglaris, had trained in Paris with Jean-Leon Gerome and Alexandre Cabanel. As an illustrator, Hassam had become an astute observer of the world around him, equally capable of capturing effects of nature as representing women in fashionable attire. Both these elements are included in <em>Woman and Mastiff in the Boston Public Garden</em>, a watercolor whose urban immediacy is enhanced by an audacious canine presence. The young woman has a firm hold on the collar of her trusty companion as they pause and gaze upward, as if fixed on a bird beyond the range of the composition. While the model’s pose might have originated in the studio, the inclusion of the dog appears fresh and original, suggesting the inspiration of Velasquez, whose paintings of mastiffs Hassam could have seen at the Prado.Velasquez’s importance to 19th-century European and American artists is widely acknowledged. Las Meniñas (1656), in which a mastiff is featured, would have been a highlight of Hassam’s 1883 visit to the Prado. He would also have seen a painting of a dwarf with a mastiff that was then considered to be a work by Velazquez, and was copied by numerous artists, including John Singer Sargent. During the winter Hassam often transcribed nature from his window or from inside a carriage, but in spring and summer he could comfortably work outdoors, openly observing city life and abandoning a palette of grays and russets for the close hue contrasts of blues and greens.Hassam described sketching his early street scenes from his window or from inside a cab in an interview with A. E. Ives, “Talks with Artists: Mr. Childe Hassam on Painting Street Scenes,” Art Amateur 27 (Oct. 1892), 116–17. The accuracy of the park’s topography, the hazy foliage below the rooftops on Beacon Hill, and the activity of the gardener who transplants a flowerbed attest to Hassam’s direct observation of this setting. The strolling female figure was an important trope for painters of modern life, both in Paris and in Boston, and appealed to collectors;By the late 1870s, this subject was already a particular preference of American collectors of paintings by Giuseppe De Nittis, Jean Beraud, Giovanni Boldini, and Jean-Francois Raffaelli. Hassam shared that interest and emphasized the respectability of his city’s parks. In 1885 he made a series of illustrations for <em>A New Departure for Girls</em>, a book by the popular author Margaret Sidney.Margaret Sidney (Mrs. Harriet Mulford Stone Lothrop), A New Departure for Girls (Boston: D. Lothrop and Co., 1886). In this inspirational novel, the protagonist sets out to seek work and finds herself on a path that curves around the lagoon in the Public Garden. (Fig. 1) “A Garden in the city’s midst!” she exclaims, describing it as a place more energizing than rural nature—still and peaceful but “responding to healthy longings for activity.”Sidney, 1886, 47–48. As in RISD’s watercolor, this view shows the garden’s suspension bridge in the background, but the stroller’s excursion takes place on the opposite side of the lagoon, with the clock tower of the old Providence-Boston train station prominent against the sky. A skilled “black-and-white man,” Hassam most likely made this version as a monochromatic painting that in turn would have been cut onto a wooden block by professional line engravers. Illustrators who provided pen-and-ink drawings and monochromatic paintings to publishers were called “black-and-white men.” Their images were then cut into hardwood printing blocks by expert line men who often added their names to the artist’s signature. John Schoelch and George L. Cowee engraved the blocks for A New Departure for Girls. Hassam’s ability to interpret the atmospheric effects of nature is perhaps most evident in the many paintings he made of the rocky coves of the Isles of Shoals, located off the coast of New Hampshire’s border with Maine. Through his friendship with the poet Celia Thaxter, Hassam became a frequent summer visitor to the island of Appledore, where Thaxter’s home served as a gathering place for artists.Hassam’s 1884 drawing of figures on a sandy beach was published as a woodcut illustration for Thaxter’s 1886 collection of poems, Idyls and Pastorals. Although the date of his first visit to Appledore is not certain, his friendship with Thaxter began in the early 1880s. See Curry, 1990, 33 and 195, n. 62. Around 1888 Hassam built a studio on Appledore, and in the ensuing summers applied his brush to recreating impressions of the flowers that filled Thaxter’s gardens and home.David Park Curry thoughtfully examines Hassam’s seascapes in the chapter “The Rocks of Appledore,” in Curry, 1990, 115–89. He dates the construction of Hassam’s studio to ca. 1888, relating it to the flurry of construction undertaken by Thaxter’s family, the Laightons, who were owners of the Appledore House hotel (Curry, 1990, 38). After a period of absence in the late 1890s, Hassam returned to Appledore regularly until around 1916. His noteworthy collaboration with Thaxter, an illustrated book entitled <em>An Island Garden</em>, appeared in 1894, the year of the writer’s death. The heightened optical perception and skill apparent in his watercolors for the book revealed an intense and personal awareness of nature that flourished in this environment. When he returned to Appledore in the late 1890s, he brought his maturity and concentration to a study of the island’s more abstract geological beauty, and initiated a series of paintings of its coastal ledges and inlets. Sketching on site, Hassam drew <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em> on July 23, 1907, from a spot on the southwest side of the island where he also painted in oil.Curry specifies the location of Diamond Cove (1990, 162) and illustrates the RISD drawing (pl. 78). He made the sketch in black pencil and colored chalks on the inside of a stiff paper folder bearing the monogram and address of Augustus H. Tennis of New York City.The monogram appears as “AHT” above “Augustus H. Tennis / 47 East Nineteenth Street / New York.” Tennis was an agent for the Howe Machine Company, and the folder may have housed pages of a trade catalogue. It originally bore a sticker for a card and millboard manufacturer: E. H. & A. C. Friedrichs Co. 169 W. 57th Street N.Y. The impression of the monogram is visible in the cliffs at the left of the drawing. The vertical crease of the booklet cover, which is pricked where it had been sewn, is also evident. Hassam trimmed the left edge of the opened cover, so the crease does not fall at the center of the composition. An oil painting of this view, entitled <em>Isles of Shoals</em>, was also completed in 1907.See Curry, pl. 79, Isles of Shoals, 1907, oil on canvas, 26 x 31 in., Portland Art Museum, Oregon Art Institute. A related painting, dated the following year, is reproduced in Curry, pl. 80, Diamond Cove, Isles of Shoals, 1908, oil on panel, 25 x 30 in., Gallery of Art, Washington University, St. Louis. In graphite and black chalk, Hassam mapped out the drawing’s composition, devising a reverse S-curve to lead the eye from the transparent waters of the cove to the rugged contours of the cliffs. He sketched the cliff walls and recesses with a close up-and-down stroke, connecting them with a line that concludes in an anchoring scribble at lower left. The rocky mass ascends to the top of the sheet where it is intersected by a sliver of the mainland, just visible on horizon. Allowing the buff color of the paper to suggest the earthy tints of the rocks, Hassam applied a palette of blues and yellow-greens to represent the lively movement of light on the water and the growth of algae on the cliffs. He used white chalk to heighten the reflected brilliance of their rocky surfaces and to pick out stones in the shallow water near the shore. A comparison of <em>Diamond Cove, Appledore</em>, with the related oil painting of this site reveals Hassam’s full grasp of his subject in its preliminary stages. The drawing contains the complete armature for the larger composition, from the slender ribbon of sky to the foreground’s rocky perch. On Appledore Hassam drew from life, recreating—even in a quick sketch—the visual experiences that were among the richest and most meaningful of his career. <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator of Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, '<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('<em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, from about 1934The drawing is undated, but the image appeared on the cover of the first edition of Sterling North’s novel Plowing on Sunday (New York: Macmillan, 1934)., was described as Grant Wood’s “finest drawing to date” when it was offered to the RISD Museum for consideration in 1937Letter from Maynard Walker, Walker Galleries, New York, to Constance M. Place, Museum of Art, RISD, February 25, 1937. The drawing was purchased by the Museum president, Mrs. Murray Danforth, for $750, a sum that reflected the limited number and availability of Wood’s works at this time. Mrs. Danforth officially made the drawing a gift to the Museum in January 1938.. The squared-off close-up of a farmer drinking from an earthenware jug was purchased by RISD’s president, Helen M. Danforth, who gave it to the collection the following year, around the time Wood visited Providence. Speaking to a capacity crowd at RISD’s Memorial Hall on a January evening, Wood stressed the importance of regional art schools and expressed his belief that small groups were now merging to make a more democratic national artWood’s lecture, which was introduced by painter John Frazier to a “large audience of artists, art students, and art lovers,” was reported in the Providence Journal article “American Artist Speaks of Work: Grant Wood, Midwestern Painter, Addresses Group at Design School,” January 22, 1938. In a letter to RISD president Mrs. Murray Danforth, former interim director Miriam Banks reported: “I have never seen Memorial Hall crowded to such capacity before on any like occasion. Every available seat on the floor was taken and the gallery filled also” (RISD Archives, Directors’ Correspondence files).. Although a leading painter of the American scene, Wood was careful to distinguish between art that advocated “a concentration on local peculiarities” and one that acknowledged important differences between the various regions of AmericaIn 1937, Wood commented on American literary regionalism, stating that “it has been a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America. But this does not mean that Regionalism, in turn, advocates a concentration on local peculiarities; such an approach results in anecdotalism and local color” (handwritten commentary on a typed proposal by “the members of English 293, October, 1937,” Grant Wood Scrapbook 02, Grant Wood 1935–1939; University of Iowa Libraries, Figge Art Museum Grant Wood Digital Collection).. He de-emphasized the term “Regionalism” in his RISD talk, insisting it was “not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality that distinguish fine painting.”From The Providence Journal, January 22, 1938: “The movement, exemplified by such men as Charles Burchfield, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh and Thomas Benton, who were through their individual techniques each expressing his particular environment was given the name Regionalism. Mr. Wood feels that since it is not geographic accent but sincere emotion and vitality which distinguish fine painting, the term Regionalism is unfortunate.” By 1938, Wood was widely recognized for the narrative appeal of paintings such as <a href="http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565"><em>American Gothic</em></a>, his apotropaic depiction of a father and daughter in front of their Iowa farmhouse. But Wood had long explored more abstract formal solutions in his pursuit of an original style that embraced native subject matter. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he elevated the figure in importance but diminished individuality in favor of a simplified composition that embedded universal qualities in an American motif. Later, in his 1936 painting <a href="https://reynoldahouse.emuseum.com/objects/12/spring-turning"><em>Spring Turning</em></a>, he reduced the farmer and plow to mere notations, stitching them to the edge of the green and brown quilt of a sculpted Midwestern landscape. Commissioned as the cover design for Sterling North’s eponymous 1934 novel, <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> depicted Stud Brailsford, “a strong man whose wishes and fancies and material ambitions are real and on a human scale.”K. W. (Kenneth White?), review of Sterling North, Plowing on Sunday, in The Saturday Review of Literature, December 15, 1934, 374. North had described Brailsford as a man with a leonine head and mass of graying curls, but the light wavy hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw of Wood’s plowman read as a stylized adaptation of <a href="https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657">the artist’s own features</a>.Wood appears in his preferred attire in a photograph with fellow artist John Steuart Curry, ca. 1932. (Accessible at https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/john-steuart-curry-and-grant-wood-8657.) It is related to <a href="http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx">a self-portrait Wood drew in 1932</a>, in which he appeared next to a windmill, wearing the bib overalls he favored.Wood wears a light-colored shirt and bib overalls in his 1932 Self-Portrait (charcoal and pastel on paper; 14 1/2 x 12 in.; Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa), accessible at http://www.crma.org/Content/Collection/Grant-Wood.aspx. This drawing appears to be the study for a painted Self Portrait, 1932–1941 (oil on Masonite panel, 14 3/4 x 12 3/8 in., Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa), in which he appears in a dark shirt. (Accessible at http://figgeartmuseum.org/getattachment/e7bb49f1-d08c-45d2-882e-575d14f729a4/Self-Portrait-65-0001.aspx?maxsidesize=300.) For both drawings he used brown paper as the support, utilizing its color to achieve an overall earth-tone that unified the composition and reinforced the connection between the figure and the land. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em>, he restricted his media to black conté crayon, ink, and gouache, which he effectively mixed to suggest indigo. Fine webs of diagonal cross-hatching suggest weight, density, and light. Wood varies these patterns to brighten the horizon and to model the plowman’s arms and face. Elsewhere, by deftly shifting his additive technique to imperceptible directional marks, he coaxes an appearance of “tooth” from the smooth paper to create a softer, fabric-like effect for the shirt and denim overalls. In the upper sky, Wood maximizes the coverage of his medium to generate a darkened sky and to force the sharp outlines of the head and water jug into relief. Rendered in a technique that recalls Georges Seurat’s landscape and figural compositions, the plowman emerges as a stoic, sculptural form in an artistic genealogy that ranges from Giotto’s solid peasants to the working men of WPA friezes. Brady M. Roberts notes parallels between Wood’s techniques and those of Seurat in the essay “The European Roots of Regionalism” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Portland, Oregon: Pomegranate, 1995), 2. In note 9 on page 227 of When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow: Grant Wood and Christian Petersen Murals (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2006), Lea Rosson DeLong cites a letter from Wood’s student Leata Rowan, who wrote that Giotto was one of the artists whom Wood taught in his classes on mural painting at the University of Iowa (January 12, 1934, Papers of Edward Rowan, Archives of American Art, reel D 141, fr. 89-01). Paul Signac quoted Edgar Degas’s comment to Seurat upon viewing La Grande Jatte: “You have been in Florence, you have. You have seen the Giottos” (cited by Robert L. Herbert, Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174 [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Abrams, 1991]). This effect reinforces the plowman’s connection to his environment and confers a sense of action frozen in time. Wood’s use of brown wrapping paper for both finished drawings and mural preparation was intentional, and he advised his students to use this inexpensive material to encourage experimentation. In 1934 he developed <a href="http://archive.inside.iastate.edu/2004/0116/wood.shtml">a suite of illustrations on brown paper</a> for a limited edition of Sinclair Lewis’s novel <em>Main Street</em>, and showed slides of those drawings at the RISD lecture.The Providence Journal, op. cit., reported that Wood showed slides of his works, including the Main Street illustrations, following the RISD lecture. That commission is Lea Rosson Delong’s subject in Grant Wood’s Main Street: Art, Literature, and the American Midwest (Ames, Iowa: University Museums, Iowa State University, 2004). Like the plowman’s, the heads and upper torsos of Lewis’s characters nearly fill their frames, and their hands and arms indicate representative gestures. While their expressions reveal distinct personalities, the plowman, in contrast, has veiled eyes and no psychologically distinguishing characteristics other than the strong contours of the face and head. By minimizing detail, as he did in his paintings of the late 1930s, Wood transformed his own likeness into a plowman who is Everyman, dressed in the farm uniform that was both democratic and anonymous in its ubiquity. In keeping with his program of simplification, Wood further reduced the imagery of <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> by eliminating the plow, the tool that served as both the icon and metaphor for the activity of tilling the earth. In <em>Plowing on Sunday</em> he introduces the reins at the lower corner of the picture to imply both the farm animals and the instrument they control, and uses the field and low horizon to reinforce the symbolic and decorative value of the leather straps. He follows their taut lines with a wavy pattern of plowed furrows and marks the border of the field with a parallel march of tiny white fence posts. Barely visible on the horizon are a classic Iowa barn and windmill, selective decorative marks that are intentional references to the rural architecture whose extinction Wood feared.The windmill is a prominent element in the two self-portraits made by Wood (cited in endnote 7). Wanda Corn, on page 126 of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Minneapolis Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1983), notes that Wood “had become particularly attached to the windmill, a familiar landmark in the Midwest, which he feared was becoming extinct,” and that he always found a way to work it into his compositions as a type of signature. Wood re-utilized and expanded the plowman image after he became director of the Iowa’s Public Works of Art Projects in 1934. A full-scale variant of the farmer, posed with his plow and its resting team of horses, drinks from a water jug in the central panel of <em>Breaking the Prairie Sod</em>, Wood’s mural cycle for the Iowa State University Library at Ames.Breaking the Prairie, 1937 (oil on canvas, center panel: 132 x 279 in.; The Iowa State University Library, Ames, Iowa; accessible at https://isuartandhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/copy-of-images-014.jpg). There is also a finished drawing for this mural: Breaking the Prairie, ca. 1935–1937 (colored pencil, chalk, and pencil on brown paper; 22 3/4 x 80 1/4 in.; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Gift of Mr. & Mrs. George D. Stoddard). <em>Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture</em> ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ', 'en') (Line: 118) Drupal\filter\Element\ProcessedText::preRenderText(Array) call_user_func_array(Array, Array) (Line: 111) Drupal\Core\Render\Renderer->doTrustedCallback(Array, Array, 'Render #pre_render callbacks must be methods of a class that implements \Drupal\Core\Security\TrustedCallbackInterface or be an anonymous function. The callback was %s. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. Maureen O’Brien Curator, Painting and Sculpture ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Reginald Marsh, the son of American artists Fred Dana Marsh and Alice Randall Marsh, was born in Paris in 1898. He grew up in comfortable circumstances in Nutley, New Jersey, and was educated at Lawrenceville School and Yale University. In the early 1920s Marsh worked in New York as a freelance artist for magazines and newspapers, developing an energized drawing style that he used to illustrate city life and its various entertainments. He also took classes at the Art Students League, studying briefly with John Sloan, George Luks, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and George Bridgman, and joined the Whitney Studio Club in 1923. That same year, Marsh married Betty Burroughs, an artist whose father, Bryson Burroughs, was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.After her divorce from Marsh in 1933, Betty Burroughs married Thomas F. Woodhouse. She later became a museum educator and was on the staff of the RISD Museum from 1951 to 1961. http://risdmuseum.org/manual/241_100_years_of_commitment She discussed Reginald Marsh in an interview with Garnett McCoy for the Archives of American Art in 1977: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-betty-bryson-woodhouse-13140 In 1925 Marsh returned to France for the first time since his childhood and spent several months studying Old Master paintings in the Louvre. His love of Rubens, whose great <em>Kermesse</em> he copied in Paris, provided the foundation for a body of work in which women—sunbathing, walking, seated on subways—were represented as modern-day counterparts of Rubens’s full-blown female forms. When he returned to New York, Marsh focused his attention on the theater of contemporary urban life, describing the city’s denizens against the backdrop of its architecture and amusements. He recombined these themes in various media for decades, without ever losing his joy in their accessibility and freshness. A large sheet in RISD’s collection, <em>Two Girls on a Ferry</em>, employs a vibrating calligraphy Marsh invented later in his career to emphasize movement. His curved, radiating pen strokes animate the costumes of the shapely young women, ruffling their skirts and capturing the sensation of the breeze on the Staten Island ferry on its approach from Governors Island. Looking out from the railing, a middle-aged gentleman in a fedora takes in the downtown skyline in a panorama that sweeps across the southern tip of Manhattan, from the Whitehall Building at left to the Art Deco–style Cities Service Building at 70 Pine Street.Marsh’s prints document the rise of lower Manhattan’s skyline, particularly between 1927 and 1932. New construction could be sketched from the point of view of Governors Island or consulted in photographs and postcard views. In Marsh’s etching of 1930, the skyscraper at 70 Pine Street which anchors RISD’s drawing was absent from the skyline, and the tall spireless tower at 20 Exchange Street, second from right, appeared under scaffolding. http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/366826 Marsh’s concurrent passion for trains provided material for an opposing motif to the exuberance of urban life. Beginning in 1928, he made numerous prints and paintings that featured the trains that transported Americans and their goods cross-country, including one that he painted in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department murals in Washington, D.CIn 1935, Marsh made a large painting of a locomotive in fresco as a proposal for the Post Office Department commission. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/07/entertainment/la-et-cm-huntington-buys-reginald-marsh-painting-20130507. His early interest in painting locomotives is discussed in http://collections.mcny.org/Gallery/24UPN47LTX1 which cites Barbara Haskell’s observation in Swing Time: Reginald Marsh and the Exuberant Chaos of Thirties New York (London: D. Giles Ltd., 2012), that he was inspired by the work of fellow artist Charles Burchfield. See Burchfield’s Gates Down (1920) in the collection of the RISD Museum as an example of that artist’s interest in trains.. The Erie Yards in Jersey City provided a convenient locus for studying these impressive machines, including the steam locomotives that served the passenger and freight routes of the New York Central Railroad. In this profile view, <em>Train,</em> Marsh depicts a workhorse engine resting in the train yard. Its design and wheel configuration identify it as a switcher, a heavy locomotive that was predominantly used to move cars in and out of train yards. The front grill, or pilot, is absent, and there is a protective railing as well as two platforms below the nose for workers to stand on as the train moved through the yardRailway historian Roger P. Hensley, publisher of the website Railroads of Madison County, Indiana, in correspondence with the author, described the purpose of this locomotive and identified it as a USRA 0-8-0 switcher.. Marsh’s portrait of his friend Llewelyn Powys represents a more personal aspect of his life. Through Betty Burroughs, Marsh met Powys (1884–1939), an English writer who lived in New York between 1921 and 1924 before marrying Alyse Gregory, an editor of <em>The Dial</em> magazineRichard Perceval Graves, The Brothers Powys (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983), 181, notes that prior to the time of Powys’s marriage to Alyse Gregory in October 1924, he had been romantically involved with Betty Burroughs.. Marsh and Powys developed a warm friendship, and during the summer of 1926 the Marshes rented a house in England not far from “White Nose,” the cottage at Dorset, Dorchester, where Powys and his wife livedMarsh’s ongoing friendship with Powys through the 1930s, and his visits to see him in Austerlitz, New York, and in Clavadel, Davos Platz, Switzerland, are documented in letters in the Reginald Marsh Papers, Archives of American Art.. They continued their friendship when Powys returned to the United States late in 1927 as a visiting critic for the book supplement of the <em>New York Herald Tribune</em>, and vacationed together in Belgium in the summer of 1928. Marsh described Powys as “a strikingly handsome man, a poetic and aristocratic head being crowned with fierce golden curls and a strongly boned forehead … . He was simple and, as he said, ‘a countryman.’ … He gave generously of friendship to me, taught me much and encouraged me in my work as a painter.”Marsh’s moving tribute to Powys is quoted in Malcolm Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys (London: John Lane, 1946), 172. In the 1930s Marsh’s second wife, Felicia, was in turn made welcome in a friendship that endured until Powys’s death from tuberculosis in 1939.See Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308 for Powys’s letters to Marsh (1927–1939). In 1938 Marsh visited Powys in Arosa, Switzerland, where the writer lived during his final illness. Marsh made several drawings and sketchbook studies of Powys in 1926, followed by two portrait etchingsFor sketches of Powys made while Marsh was in England in 1926, see Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel NRM3, Sketchbook #4: fr. 633, 634 (July 8, 1926), 643 (June, 1926), and Sketchbook #5: fr. 677 (August 6, 1926). See also finished drawings of Powys seated in a chair in his library in Dorset in Reginald Marsh Papers Box 5, Folder 18, Nos. 20–21. For Marsh’s etchings, see Norman Sasowsky, The Prints of Reginald Marsh, an Essay and Definitive Catalog of His Linoleum Cuts, Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, 1976) Sasowsky, 1976, p. 105, no. 42, Llewelyn Powys, 1927 (estimate), 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in., ill.; and p. 146, no. 98, Llewelyn Powys, October 26, 1930, 5 x 4 in., ill., and also exhibited a painting of Powys at the Whitney Studio Club’s 1928 members’ exhibitionThirteenth Annual Exhibition of Paintings by the Members of the Club, 29 April–26 May, 1928, no. 116, Llewelyn Powys.. The ink wash <em>Portrait of Llewelyn Powys</em> in RISD’s collection is undated, but its pose and costume are similar to those of Powys in a photograph taken by Doris Ulmann in 1928.At least two photographs from the 1928 Ulmann sitting are known. The frontal pose, “Llewelyn Powys in New York, 1928,” is reproduced in Elwin, The Life of Llewelyn Powys, opp. p. 164. A second image, with Powys’s head turned slightly, is very close to Marsh’s wash drawing, but he appears a bit heavier and more rumpled and has a brighter look in his eyes in Marsh’s version. Marsh’s ability to capture his subject was praised by Powys, who described one of the images as “the embodiment of the Powys family [—] the trunk from which we were chopped, the rock from which we were cut.” Alyse Gregory expressed a desire to have Marsh paint Powys again in 1934, writing, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.”Alyse Gregory wrote to Marsh on April 7[?], 1934, “I long to have you paint him—he never since I have known him has looked so striking.” Archives of American Art, Reginald Marsh Papers, Reel 308, fr. 362. Ironically, the final painted portrait of Powys was to be a large, disturbing canvas made by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Powys’s neighbor in Davos. Powys’s genuine empathy for Kirchner did not enhance his opinion of that effort; he described the portrayal to Marsh as a “slipper-slopper studio-prophet” and a “fine idealist without a wrinkle in his forehead.”Powys to Marsh, 1939, Clavadel, Davos Platz, in The Letters of Llewelyn Powys, selected and edited by Louis Wilkinson with an introduction by Alyse Gregory (London: John Lane, 1943), 277–78. “It reaches from ceiling to floor and is admired by lovers of ‘modern art,’ but Alyse and I can’t abide it.” Powys’s friendship with Kirchner is discussed by Jacqueline Peltier in “Llewelyn Powys et Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, ou l’histoire d’un portrait,” which includes a photograph of the now lost portrait. Powys, Swiss Essays (London: John Lane, 1947), includes the essay on Kirchner Powys sent to Marsh in 1938. He shared this opinion with Marsh shortly before his death, along with a sympathetic essay he had written about Kirchner. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->getLinkInstances('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 116) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->replaceCallback(Array) preg_replace_callback('|]*)>(.*?)|s', Array, 'Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. ') (Line: 123) Drupal\footnotes\Plugin\Filter\FootnotesFilter->process('Agrippina the Younger watches as men of the emperor move nearer and nearer to her. They carry weapons. Having survived one attempt on her life, she knows that she will not survive another. One man knocks her over the head with a club and another raises his sword. With her last breath, she implores her killers to strike through her womb— the womb that birthed Nero, her matricidal son. <em>The Remorse of Nero After Killing his Mother</em> by John William Waterhouse Public domain, source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse/the-remorse-of-nero-after-the- murder-of-his-mother-1878, in which Nero realizes that maybe killing his mother 1 wasn’t a nice thing to do. Image courtesy of The Victorian Web This account of Agrippina’s death, corroborated by several ancient historians but likelyC.f., Tacitus 14; Dio 12.12-14. embellished, previews the difficulties we will face in exploring Agrippina in the historical record. Why does Agrippina asked to be stabbed through the womb? Yes, she birthed Nero, but could her last plea also represent a Lady Macbeth-esque desire to unsex herself—a metonymic exhortation to destroy that which made her a woman? Is this question of any import to her portrait at the RISD Museum? Turning first to how contemporary revisionist historians have begun to view earlier historians of Agrippina, I will then look at the role of Agrippina’s portrait as a living cultural artifact inextricably linked with certain changes in the historical reception of Agrippina. Agrippina the Younger (15–59 CE) was closely connected to the first five Roman emperors: she was great-granddaughter of Augustus, great-niece and adoptive granddaughter of Tiberius, sister of Caligula, niece and fourth wife of Claudius, and mother of Nero. Beyond her noble status, Agrippina demanded “real and official power” and not mere “influence.” That Agrippina faces a hostile historical record isImperial Women 259. beyond debate and related to her demands for this sort of power. Since Suetonius andIbid; I, Claudia 62. Tacitus, she has been characterized as bloodthirsty, overly ambitious, sexually flagrant, and unfeminine; and accused of crimes from murder to incest.Imperial Women, 1. Susan Wood, who has written much on Agrippina the Younger and other Roman women, traces this hostile historical record, above all else, to Agrippina’s encroachment on traditionally male privileges, and colorfully points to prejudices and inaccuracies in many of the accusations against her. I would like to focus first on Wood’s assertionImperial Women 259. that the frequency that powerful and intelligent woman faced nearly identical accusations renders them suspect. Such depictions of these women, which still abound in AmericanImperial Women 262 politics today, stem from actual misogyny or a desire to use a stereotype as an easy rhetorical shortcut. Second, Wood holds that the structure of Roman society encouraged its women to act indirectly. Direct avenues of holding power were closed off to women and thus, if they wanted to exercise power, they were forced to pursue “devious and manipulative forms of behavior.” While not exonerating Agrippina from all blame— even the most revisionist of historians agree that she was still guilty of many crimes— we should look critically on accusations against her, in particular those that follow a predictable pattern. Understanding Agrippina’s legacy in the contemporary historical debate prepares us to more fully appreciate the RISD Museum's portrait of Agrippina, its role (or roles) in this muddled historical record, and what it means to the viewer today. Since the move away from more realistic representations under Augustus, Roman portraiture began to be used as a tool for communicating ideologies.www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm What sort of ideology does Agrippina’s portrait communicate? First of all, we must ask who commissioned the statue, and thus who was doing the communicating. We can’t be sure that Agrippina commissioned the statue, or when in her life it would have been commissioned. Museum records date the piece to circa 40 CE. If dated before Caligula’s death, it could have been commissioned by Caligula himself. In this case, the statue would have acted as part of Caligula’s plan to elevate Agrippina, Drusilla, and his other sisters.. Through this Cult of Drusilla, Caligula sought to set up his sisters as objects of veneration in order to cement his own rule and power.Barrett 225; “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula”. They were invoked with Caligula in public oaths and, together with Antonia the Younger, were the first to be granted privileges normally accorded to the Vestal Virgins.Behen 62 We can see an example of such a depiction on the backside of the coin belowBarret 225; Source of image: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/sear5/s1800.html: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caligula_sestertius_RIC_33_680999.jpg">Sestertius from rule of Caligula. Front: Germanicus; Back: Agrippina the Younger and her sisters.</a> However, if we suppose that the statue was commissioned by Agrippina, the function is altered and Agrippina is the one in control of manipulating her own image. This portrait and other commissioned by Agrippina can as Curator of Ancient Art Gina Borromeo writes, “give us an idea of how she wished to be portrayed.”Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” Given that Agrippina’ autobiography was destroyed,Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” this piece might be able to grant us invaluable insight into understanding a figure so prejudiced by the historical record, as she herself wished to be perceived. In any case, one should be no less critical here than with the rest of the historical record, and we can only suggest this as one possible interpretation. Presuming that Agrippina commissioned the portrait, it seems unlikely that it was when Agrippina’s power was most threatened. From late 39 to January 41, she was exiled by her brother Caligula. It might be the case that this statue was a part of an effort by Agrippina to reconsolidate her power upon returning from exile. It is interesting to entertain the idea that this might be from a year as late as 49 — after she married Claudius and become empress but that seems unlikely, as other statues we have from that period display evidence of an imperial diadem.Behen 63. The idea that Agrippina commissioned the portrait can be supported with close inspection. The portrait seems to depart from the faceless, unassuming Vestal Virgin of the sestertius minted under Caligula. She does not ask us to idealize her as some feminine standard of beauty; rather, she presents herself as “rather jowly” with “heavy features” and a “large nose,”Barrett 225. and there is a “certain asymmetry in her features” and especially the nose.Ridgway 201. This could be a response to gossip that circulated against her, as a woman and of which she might have had some awareness. As contemporary biographer Anthony A. Barrett observes, her attractiveness is not a “trivial issue” when historians such as Tacitus claimed that she was a “beautiful woman” who used her “physical charms to ensnare a defenseless Claudius, among others.”Barrett 225. Agrippina looks determined, fearless, and perhaps even disdainful. The severe eyebrows extend horizontally to the hairline and dislocate the forehead, and elevate the corner of the brows in a way that lend force to this expression.Ridgway 201. Running parallel from a center part, the tresses of hair becomes tighter as it moves towards the ears.Ibid. This style possibly evokes, as it does in other portraits of her,Behen 63. that of Agrippina’s mother who was also politically powerful and suffered exile. The allusion to her mother’s hairstyle would have presumably been more apparent to those who lived in Rome who grew up around representations of Agrippina the Elder. In drawing comparison to her mother, Agrippina the Younger insists on her noble lineage and right to wield authority, even as a woman; she anticipates the future power that she would one day hold and had pretensions of holding and legitimizes her right to that power by invocation. Similarly her protruding upper lip and small chin recall depictions of her brother Caligula, Behen 62. and these resemblances seek to further highlight her dynastic right to rule. The bust of the statue—including the taupe tunic, green mantle, and socle (or simple pedestal)—is not ancient but likely from the 18th century and parallels other portraits we have from this era.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” In addition to this theory, this article also contains a more detailed treatment of the 18th century additions. What does the addition say about 18th century tastes and perceptions of this portrait, and the larger question of how historical forces can shape perceptions of an object? To begin to answer these questions, one must first understand 18th century restoration practices. Often broken statutes were mended with new creations (for another example, the RISD Museum’s <em>Figure in the Guise of Hermes</em>; both the ancient body and removed leg of 18th century origin can be viewed in the Ancient Art Gallery). The addition of the bust in the case of the Agrippina perhaps was responding to a need to more easily display the piece and a perceived lack of color. The RISD Museum acquired the piece from a Marchioness of Linlithgow and before that it was probably proudly exhibited by many other wealthy individuals. Here these individuals used this piece in a similar manner to how we guessed Agrippina might have—to highlight nobility and power. These perceived deficiencies unawarely hit on the part that the portrait played in antiquity. As Borromeo elucidates, ancient statues of white marble were typically painted in vivid colors, thus this 18th century addition incidentally gives the contemporary museumgoer some indication of the effect that color would have added.Borromeo, “Looking an Empress in the Eye.” While this proves to be an interesting historical coincidence, one would err to imagine that this negates the history of this object and reverts it to some earlier form; rather, these additions present a visual manifestation of how viewers of different periods can bring something of their own age to a work, so as to inscribe new meaning and shed light on aspects that have long laid dormant. As the literary critic and theorist Stephen Greenblatt states, “Cultural artifacts do not stay still, . . . they exist in time, and . . . they are bound up with personal and institutional conflicts, negotiations, and appropriations.” One would be remiss to see Agrippina’s portrait at the RISD Museum and assume its significance was locked up in Imperial Rome. Commenting on the legacy of Agrippina, Barrett questions whether she was ever able to escape a “devastating ‘image’ problem.”Barrett 225. Like Wood, he views her manipulation as necessary—although not excusable—in the misogynistic culture that she faced. Successful manipulation was not only a matter of publicity but also of life and death. She excelled in this manipulation as the wife of Claudius but “tragically failed” as the life of Nero, leading to the death described at the beginning of this essay. In her own time, Barrett concludes, “She did not change the hardened attitude of her contemporaries, but she did define what Romans were willing to tolerate.” In a similar way, her portrait measures what the people of various ages are willing to tolerate, and mirrors and even influences social and cultural processes. The recent revisionist work of historians such as Wood and Barrett opens up to us new hermeneutic possibilities that reflect larger developments and processes of our times. On the other hand, we should avoid presenting our own age as superior. As media coverage of the 2016 American presidential election reminds us, it is all too easy to let misleading tropes color perception. Although it cannot be said that, when it comes to attitudes about women, American society is fully beyond the hardened attitudes of Imperial Rome, examining how other ages received Agrippina and her portrait can alert us to systemic flaws in our own thought processes. Bibliography Behen, Michael J., in Diana Kleiner and Susan Matheson, eds. I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, 1996), 62-63. Barrett, Anthony. Agrippina. Florence, US: Routledge, 2002. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 15 May 2016. Borromeo, Gina. “Looking an Empress in the Eye,” RISD Museum Manual. Web. May 2016 Clark, A. M., “An Agrippina,” Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum Notes 44 (May 1958) 3–5, 10. Ridgway, Brunilde S., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Classical Sculpture (Providence, 1972) 86–87, 201–204. Trentinella, Rosemarie. “Roman Portrait Sculpture: The Stylistic Cycle.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. www.metmuseum.org/toah/ hd/ropo2/hd_ropo2.htm (October 2003) Wood, Susan E., “Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula,” American Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995): 457–82. Wood, Susan E., Imperial Women: A Study in Public Images, 40 BC–AD 68 (Boston, 1999), with earlier references. 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